I N   V I T R O    Issue 2.10 - October 1996

Consensual Hallucination Comes of Age

By Brian Stableford

Cyberspace is no longer the new frontier; William Gibson's new novel, Idoru, makes it seem distinctly cramped. Is cyberpunk finally having to grow up?



Imaginary futures soon become outdated in a fast-changing world. And the nearer they are to the present, the faster they decay. The futures that suffer most are those so immediate as to be seized by the present and hauled aboard, annexed into the cultural matrix. Though the present cannot simply reach out and grab the hypothetical hardware imagined by science-fiction writers, it can lay firm claim to the softer aspects of the fiction: the attitudes, the ambitions, the vocabularies of words and ideas.

William Gibson's Neuromancer did not become the science-fictional supernova of 1984 because it was unusually prescient, nor because of any unique literary quality. It was spectacular because it caught the mood of the moment so exactly that it became a major force in reshaping that mood. Idoru, Gibson's latest contribution to the fast-mutating mythology of cyberspace, could not possibly turn the trick again.

Developments in the real world have forced Gibson to correct and refine his accounts of the future of the Internet, and his acceptance of that responsibility has clipped his imaginative wings. The more realistic his imagery has become, the more securely it has been anchored down. Ironically, his success has forced him to retreat from the liberating genre of science fiction into the tight corner of the technothriller. The manner in which he fills in the cultural and technological decor that whizzes by as the plot unwinds is still both deft and clever. The currency is undebased - but it is no longer newly-minted.

Gibson's early cyberpunk stories caught the imagination of people who wanted to be cyberpunks, at least in their dreams. People who spent hour after hour staring into VDU screens had every reason for wanting to identify with the heroes of Burning Chrome, surfing the crest of the invading program at unbelievable speed, crashing the walls of Chrome's castles of ice and zeroing in on the heart of darkness beyond those walls. Gibson immediately ceased to be a mere author and anticipator; he became a guru.

In Neuromancer and Gibson's other early stories, cyberspace was a wilderness waiting to be explored. It was only a "consensual hallucination" and its most promising pastures were hidden behind forbidding walls of ice (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). In Idoru, the wilderness has been civilised; it is regulated and efficiently policed. Mini-worlds established by individuals, though supposedly private, are by no means inviolable. In order to get away from the rules and responsibilities of cybercitizenship, Idoru's free spirits have been forced to build a narrow world-within-the-world, expanded from a "killfile" - a cemetery for deleted data. This free space is called the Walled City; it is modelled on Kowloon, a lawless enclave on the fringe of Hong Kong, caught like a stray ear of corn in a crack between the grinding mill-wheels of East and West. To effect this transformation - a Big Bang in reverse - has taken Gibson a mere twelve years.

The protagonists of Idoru are typically Gibsonian social outsiders. Laney has a quasi-supernatural talent for spotting "nodes" of significance in streams of data, probably as a result of his being used as a test-subject for mind-bending drugs while growing up in an orphanage. Chia is a lonely teenager who has compensated for her parents' emotional remoteness by idolising a fashionable rock star. The real subject of the plot is, however, the two characters on whom the attention of these two actors is firmly fixed: the rock star and the idoru ("idol singer") he intends to marry. The heart of the book is its analysis of their fame, and hence of fame in general - a topic which may testify to the extent to which Gibson's own situation changed during those twelve magical years.

Laney is on the run from a vengeful former employer who operates the ultimate TV tabloid, one dedicated to the relentless pursuit and destruction-by-scandal of celebrities. Chia's idol is essentially a creation of the media, gifted with supernatural youth by the manipulation of his appearance. The idoru represents the extrapolation of this process to its logical limit, in that there is no flesh and blood behind the image; she is wholly synthetic. Idoru posits that this marriage of the "real" and "imaginary" rock stars is, in fact, not merely legitimate but uniquely appropriate: a modern Alchemical Wedding. If the novel lacks dramatic tension it is only because its rhetoric is too persuasive, its conclusion too obvious. The Cinderella of the future is an artificial intelligence and Prince Charming is the distilled essence of celebrity. The only palace to which such lovers can retire, if they hope to live happily ever after, is a walled and hidden city. Those who have idolised William Gibson will undoubtedly find this sad, but they know full well - because they live in the real world and understand the pressure it exerts upon the imagination - that it is true.

Read an exclusive extract from Idoru.

Brian Stableford is a science-fiction novelist, historian and critic. He lives in Reading.